forced to move?

According to several sources, the first one I saw being the drunken blog, Yellow Dog Linux (YDL) will no longer support “old world” Macs. Hmmm, while I understand that they need to have a viable business without stretching themselves too thin,this saddens me.

I have been running YDL on an old Power Computing Power Tower Pro 200. This is one of the Mac clones from the late 90’s. It’s a sweet little computer that I bought from a graphic designer for $200 a few years back. The thing has been running non-stop as my mail server. There were 2 times it was down. Once, after uptime of nearly 300 days, I was rooting around in my closet (server room) and kicked the plug. had to reboot. The second time was when I moved to my new place. Never had to touch it since. The thing just runs, and relatively quietly, too.

Anyway, the “new world” macs have different firmware, and thus makes the older macs obsolete. There is hope, however. I recently got NetBSD running on an old 5500. The 5500 is also an old world system. So, when YDL no longer supports my version (2.3) of linux, then I’ll wipe the box and run NetBSD.

It’s strange, but more and more of my computers are running *BSD. It’s as though these PCs are born with and grow up running Windows®, Linux is the Ferrari of their mid-life crises, and when they get long in the tooth and want to settle down, they run *BSD.